Crossroads GPS — an independent Republican organization co-founded by involving former White House adviser Karl Rove; group and claims it is not affiliated with Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The Senate Finance Committee today voted to remove a proposed welfare drug-testing program and add $42 million to the state’s Clean Ohio program to help pay for green space projects and farmland preservation. However, the drug tests could return through a separate bill.

Democrats controlling the Senate have rejected for the second consecutive year a budget plan passed by House Republicans. The vote came after a daylong debate today in which Democrats blasted Republicans for refusing to consider tax increases as part of a solution to trillion-dollar deficits.

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich won’t be running for Congress in Washington state.

CINCINNATI (AP) — A Catholic university in eastern Ohio says it will drop student health insurance partly because of a new federal health-care rule requiring religious-affiliated institutions’ insurance plans to provide contraception coverage.

YOUNGSTOWN — “Obama Economics.” “Romney Economics.” Discuss. In the bite-sized, 140-character universe of today, Vice President Joe Biden shrank the central debate of the 2012 presidential election down to two catch phrases that both the Obama re-election team and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney can latch onto.

An Oklahoma man who has testified against Ohio’s proposed exotic-animals law is being accused of running a wild-animals park where children have been bitten and clawed by tigers and five tigers died. The Humane Society of the United States today released results of its undercover investigation of GW Exotic Animal Park in Wynnewood, Okla. Joe Schreibvogel, president of the park, is also head of the U.S. Zoological Association, a national group that has vigorously opposed Ohio’s exotic-animals law.

After months of silence, George W. Bush finally weighed on the presidential race - with four short words. "I'm for Mitt Romney," the former president said yesterday in Washington as the doors of his elevator shut, perhaps his only public statement on the race before the Nov. 6 election. Romney's campaign doesn't foresee the 43rd president playing a substantive role in the race. Aides are carefully weighing how much the former president should be involved in the GOP convention - and for good reason. The Bush fatigue that was a drag on GOP nominee John McCain four years ago, and on the country, still lingers, including among Republicans.

On Thursday at noon, Michelle Nixten, consumer complaint specialist with the Ohio Attorney General's office, will answer readers' questions about credit reports and offer tips on where find help.

One by one - with the exception of holdout Ron Paul - the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of Romney. Don't try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

Gov. John Kasich said he not only thought Ohio would lose out on Discover Financial Services’ new data-center project, but that the company also would move some of its existing jobs in New Albany out of state.

A nationwide HIV-testing and advocacy group for people with AIDS says Columbus is delaying its clinic and thrift store in the University District because it is a gay-friendly business. Michael Weinstein, president of the nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said yesterday that he thinks some people on the city’s development staff don’t agree with the mission of the thrift store and clinic, to be called Out of the Closet.

Oil and gas drillers would have to disclose more details about the chemicals they use in Utica shale wells under a bill that passed the Ohio Senate yesterday. Even as lawmakers, drilling regulators and industry officials praised the plan as the toughest in the nation, environmental-advocacy groups said the bill would still allow companies to withhold information about “fracking” chemicals by calling them trade secrets.

Revamping how the state measures schools and district performance on annual report cards is too important and too complex to do on the fly, a state legislator says. House Education Committee Chairman Gerald L. Stebelton, R-Lancaster, said last night that he intends to strip from Gov. John Kasich’s proposed education overhaul a new and more-rigorous grading system.

After a two-year wait — and a behind-the-scenes challenge by the Wright Brothers — Thomas Alva Edison might finally be headed to Washington. Maybe.

The response to President Barack Obama’s support for same-sex marriage has run the gamut among those in the black religious community, but pastors said they doubt he’ll lose any significant political support.

Democrats called it “terrible” and “mean-spirited,” while advocates for the poor said a Senate GOP plan to require some welfare applicants to submit to drug tests would further stigmatize the needy and produce very few benefits.

WASHINGTON (AP) — George W. Bush is backing presumptive Republican White House nominee Mitt Romney.

WASHINGTON — Advocacy groups spending millions of dollars in the 2012 campaign are faced with the prospect of having to reveal the donors who have been secretly financing their efforts after a federal appellate court panel refused to block a lower-court order requiring the move.

WASHINGTON — Bob Kerrey won the Democratic nomination for Nebraska’s open U.S. Senate seat yesterday while Republicans decided a tight three-way race.

AS PUNDITS yammer about whether it’s worse for a presidential candidate to have eaten a dog or packed one on the car roof, fictionalized autobiographical details or snipped a schoolmate’s hair, this nation faces serious problems that demand full attention.

When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

It’s a teachable moment, but what’s the right lesson? Already, the $2 billion-plus trading debacle at JPMorgan Chase has inspired a powerful storyline. Nothing has changed since the financial crisis, it’s said. Big banks remain out of control, gambling recklessly.

As Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman tries to hold together an agreement to end job-poaching among local communities and encourage regional growth, it’s disappointing that some elected officials are balking.